Tag: Premium

Jason Schafer captions Dick Fontaine’s 1967 jazz short, Sound??:

I’d be doing it great disservice by describing it as anything short of importantly badass. The piece, a collaboration between highly influential multi-instrumentalist musical madman, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and avant-garde sound artist John Cage, explores the very nature of sound and music itself as the piece shifts between the two pioneers. Kirk does his thing. He plays onstage with three saxophones at once, and a flute and a whistle. He hands out whistles to the audience at one point and calls for a participatory “blues in the key of W.” He plays with animals at the zoo. The footage of a performance at Ronnie Scott’s in London is incendiary. Cage, for his part, is interspersed throughout the film reading rhetorical questions in a variety of city locations about what it means to make music. If music is just noise, can anyone do it? What’s the point in making it? “Sounds are just vibrations,” says Cage, “why didn’t I mention that before? Doesn’t that stir the imagination?” The whole thing, if nothing else, certainly stirs the imagination.

In an earlier review, Eric Magnuson remarked on the “wild juxtapositions” between Cage and Kirk:

The two iconoclasts didn’t have much in common composition wise. But they did share the optimistic view that music could be derived from just about anything that made a sound, whether it was a child’s toy, a passing truck or Cage’s musical bicycle. Throughout this 27-minute film, Fontaine mixes Cage’s philosophical questions on what constitutes music with live footage of Kirk playing a lively, experimental set at Ronnie Scott’s, deftly highlighting how each man’s credo can seamlessly bounce off the other. The whistle scene is especially enlightening.

Mallory Ortberg digs up this amazingly horrible letter from Ayn Rand to her 17-year-old niece, who asked the famous libertarian novelist and “philosopher” if she could borrow $25. Here’s how it begins:

Dear Connie:

You are very young, so I don’t know whether you realize the seriousness of your action in writing to me for money. Since I don’t know you at all, I am going to put you to a test.

If you really want to borrow $25 from me, I will take a chance on finding out what kind of person you are. You want to borrow the money until your graduation. I will do better than that. I will make it easier for you to repay the debt, but on condition that you understand and accept it as a strict and serious business deal. Before you borrow it, I want you to think it over very carefully.

It gets even better. After proposing a repayment scheme, Aunt Ayn really turns on the charm:

I want you to understand right now that I will not accept any excuse—except a serious illness. If you become ill, then I will give you an extension of time—but for no other reason. If, when the debt becomes due, you tell me that you can’t pay me because you needed a new pair of shoes or a new coat or you gave the money to somebody in the family who needed it more than I do—then I will consider you as an embezzler. No, I won’t send a policeman after you, but I will write you off as a rotten person and I will never speak or write to you again.

Now I will tell you why I am so serious and severe about this. I despise irresponsible people. I don’t want to deal with them or help them in any way. An irresponsible person is a person who makes vague promises, then breaks his word, blames it on circumstances and expects other people to forgive it. A responsible person does not make a promise without thinking of all the consequences and being prepared to meet them.

Read the rest here. The missive also can be found in The Letters of Ayn Rand.

John Buntin challenges the conventional wisdom:

That gentrification displaces poor people of color by well-off white people is a claim so commonplace that most people accept it as a widespread fact of urban life. It’s not. Gentrification of this sort is actually exceedingly rare. The socio-economic status of most neighborhoods is strikingly stable over time. When the ethnic compositions of low-income black neighborhoods do change, it’s typically because Latinos and other immigrants move into a neighborhood—and such in-migration is probably more beneficial than harmful. As for displacement—the most objectionable feature of gentrification—there’s actually very little evidence it happens. In fact, so-called gentrifying neighborhoods appear to experience less displacement than nongentrifying neighborhoods.

He shares some research by sociologist Patrick Sharkey showing gentrification’s surprising benefits:

Sometimes these changes can be difficult, resulting as they often do in new political leaders and changes to the character of the communities. But Sharkey’s research suggests they also bring real benefits. Black residents, particularly black youth, living in more diverse neighborhoods find significantly better jobs than peers with the same skill sets who live in less diverse neighborhoods. In short, writes Sharkey, “There is strong evidence that when neighborhood disadvantage declines, the economic fortunes of black youth improve, and improve rather substantially.”

In other words, the problem isn’t so much that gentrification hurts black neighborhoods; it’s that it too often bypasses them. Harvard sociologists Robert Sampson and Jackelyn Hwang have shown that neighborhoods that are more than 40 percent black gentrify much more slowly than other neighborhoods. The apparent unwillingness of other ethnic groups to move into and invest in predominantly black communities in turn perpetuates segregation and inequality in American society.

Previous Dish on gentrification here.

(Photo by Flickr user MsSaraKelly.)

Alexander Nazaryan considers the recently released, over one-thousand page David Foster Wallace Reader, which includes everything from excerpts of Wallace’s fiction to the syllabi of classes he taught:

[D]o we need The David Foster Wallace Reader? According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, probably not. Though the book seems like a Christmas gift in the making, it contains almost no new work. But I think I get what [editorial adviser and Wallace’s former editor Michael] Pietsch is doing here, and I am all for it. You need evidence of miracles for sainthood; you need something only marginally more mundane to sustain a bid for lasting literary greatness, for entrance into that pantheon protected from the vicissitudes of literary taste. This is part of that effort, a reminder of how good Wallace could be, whether he was writing about Kafka or the Illinois State Fair, whether he was making stuff up or trying to see things as they actually are.

Tim Groenland posits that the Reader answers the eternal dilemma of what DFW newbies should read first:

The David Foster Wallace Reader is, essentially, an attempt to address this question by presenting as many of the answers as possible between one set of covers. Assembled with one eye firmly on the classroom (and, perhaps, the other on a world in which people are less and less likely to read 1,079-page novels), it includes selections from each of Wallace’s fictional works as well as several of his most celebrated essays with occasional commentary from writers, critics and friends.

The foreword (written jointly by Wallace’s editor, his agent and his widow) claims that “teachers will find here an ideal introduction for students”, a statement that makes the book’s main purpose clear. The Reader can be seen as a move by the Wallace estate in the emerging struggle to manage his legacy. Since his untimely and tragic death (he took his own life at the age of 46) a certain amount of romantic tortured-genius aura has accumulated around Wallace, to the dismay of friends and family. A Hollywood biopic is due shortly in which the author will be played by Jason Segel (star of The Muppets and Knocked Up, among others); the Wallace estate has already disowned the film. The Reader represents an attempt to position the writer as a serious literary figure rather than a pop icon.

Recent Dish on David Foster Wallace here, here, and here.

A new study suggests the mere presence of an iPhone improves test-takers’ performance:

[P]articipants were placed in a cubicle and asked to perform word search puzzles. Researchers monitored their anxiety levels, heart rate, and blood pressure while the subjects had their iPhones with them. Then, the real experiment began. Researchers told participants that their iPhones were causing interference with the blood pressure cuff and asked them to move their phones. The phones were placed in a nearby cubicle close enough to be within eyeshot and earshot of each subject. Next, the researchers called the subjects’ phones—now placed out of reach—while they were working on the puzzle. Immediately afterwards, they collected the same data.

The results changed dramatically. Not only did the participants’ puzzle performance decline significantly while the phones were off-limits, but their anxiety levels, blood pressure and heart rates skyrocketed.

Of course, students aren’t representative of all people, but Russell Clayton, a doctoral candidate who led the study, thinks the results can tell us something about how we see our phones. “iPhones are capable of becoming an extension of selves such as that when separated, we experience a lessing of ‘self’ and a negative physiological state,” he writes. Clayton and his co-authors suggest that having phones nearby may help smartphone owners perform better during tasks that require undivided attention.

Julian Baggini expands on that last point, drawing on the “extended mind” hypothesis of philosophers David Chalmers and Andy Clark, which proposes “that the boundaries of the human mind might extend beyond the skull”:

The extended mind thesis simply points to the fact that we also use things outside of our bodies in the same way. We don’t store all our memories in our brains: we put some in phone books, photo albums and diaries. We don’t just use fingers to count: we use calculators and abacuses. If we’re trying to think things through, we may physically as well as mentally list the pros and cons to help weigh them up.

Some find our increased reliance on such mental prosthetics troubling. Will a generation that can google everything, everywhere, grow up unable to remember anything? Any gains should outweigh the losses. Brain power is a finite resource and we don’t want to use it all up on data storage and retrieval. After all, savants who remember everything often understand very little. Being able to outsource some of the grunt work of cognition frees up our brains to do the interesting, creative processing of the information. The best way of keeping our minds engaged and active might well be to let them extend far outside our skulls.

Last month, Jacob Harris raged against the rise of  “data journalism” created by companies looking for viral media coverage, such as the Durex effort Voxified above:

PR-driven data stories [come] from an opposite direction to traditional data journalism. This is not data that is collected and analyzed in response to specific questions and whose quality is checked before publication, but prebuilt charts pushed to news organizations like press releases and targeted against specific topics like sex, anxiety, and shame that are more likely to elicit clicks. If you’re a company looking for press, why not use those fancy data scientists you hired to also generate some free publicity outside the company? And if you’re a reporter at a news startup who needs to constantly fill the news hole with new material, why wouldn’t you run one of these? Everybody’s happy, even if the data isn’t right.

Today he revisited the topic, wondering why more people aren’t creeped out by companies harvesting and publishing data about them like this:

Remember [that article] about Target figuring out which customers are pregnant [by analyzing what seemingly unrelated products they bought]; it’s hard not to see it as an invasion of privacy even if it’s perfectly legal. Contrast that with this analysis by Jawbone showing how the Napa earthquake affected its users’ sleep. Despite being built on deeply personal information, it doesn’t seem to have raised any ire from readers online. Why?

It’s possible that the difference is wearing a Jawbone is voluntary — but so is shopping at Target. Indeed, I think it’s clear that both companies analyzed personal data that users generally assume is private. It looks like Jawbone managed to sidestep squeamishness by releasing a cool chart instead of boasting about their ability to target individual user’s sleep pattern, although that’s likely something their servers are doing. All of which suggests a golden opportunity for big retailers who didn’t know how to talk about their use of big data without sounding totally creepy. Now they can — with maps!

Jeffrey Aaron Snyder gives a mixed review to Lani Guinier’s The Tyranny of Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America. In particular, Snyder finds wanting the book’s criticisms of the SAT:

Guinier, like many critics of the SAT, is dismissive of the test’s predictive power, claiming that the correlation between SAT scores and first-year college grade-point-average is “very, very slight.” In fact, most studies put the figure in the neighborhood of .45, which is a shade higher than the correlation between rates of smoking and incidences of lung cancer. It is also only a tad lower than the correlation between cumulative high school GPA and first-year college GPA. …

Guinier has been arguing for years that the SAT is a “wealth test.” Is she right? Money indisputably matters. The correlation between socioeconomic status and SAT scores is around .40. (If the SAT were nothing but a wealth test, as Guinier maintains, this figure would be 1.00.) For high school graduates from the class of 2013, students from families earning more than $200,000 a year had an average combined SAT score of 1,714 (out of 2400) compared to an average combined score of 1,326 for students from families earning less than $20,000 a year. These averages, of course, obscure the enormous variation within different income brackets—many poor students ace the test while many rich ones bomb it.

Standardized testing aside, Snyder is open to Guinier’s suggestion that “our educational system should re-orient itself around collaboration and peer learning”:

The message that we send to students through standardized testing is often perverse: we are going to assess your abilities in a vacuum, without access to the books, Internet, or peers that you will almost always have access to in the working world. In this respect, standardized testing promotes an antiquated model of teaching, learning, and knowledge. While collaboration in the workplace is rewarded, collaboration on a test is penalized as cheating. It is not just testing, however, that prizes individual achievement. The conventional classroom is organized around individual performance, with students laboring away at solitary desks. The push for more open, collaborative classrooms has always faced stiff resistance from “traditional” teachers and school administrators. If you agree with Guinier that education should be a more cooperative enterprise, then the crucial question is how to incentivize schools to embrace this cultural shift.

Neal Gabler introduces us to the folks who name “everything from companies to products to websites to ingredients to colors”:

Today roughly 500,000 businesses open each month in the United States, and every one needs a name. From Dickens with his bitter Gradgrind to J. K. Rowling with her sour Voldemort, authors have long understood that names help establish character. Politicians know that calling a bill the USA Patriot Act makes it a little harder to vote against.

The effects of strategic naming are all around us, once we begin to look for them.

“You go to a restaurant, and you don’t order ‘dolphin fish,’ ” [namer Anthony] Shore points out. “You order ‘mahi-mahi.’ You don’t order ‘Patagonian toothfish.’ You order ‘Chilean sea bass.’ You don’t buy ‘prunes’ anymore; they’re now called ‘dried plums.’ ” Maria Cypher, the founder and director of the naming agency Catchword, which named the McDonald’s McBistro sandwich line, will tell you that names “give us a shared understanding of what something is.” Paola Norambuena, the executive director of verbal identity at Interbrand, says they give us a “shortcut to a good decision.”

Naming is more art than science:

The oddity is that for all the weight a company places on choosing names, the decisions arise from a process that couldn’t be less corporate. There are no naming metrics, no real way to know if a new name helps or hinders. The field attracts people who are comfortable with such ambiguity. Jay Jurisich, the founder of Zinzin, is a painter with an M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Jim Singer, who founded Namebase, was a jingle writer, and Margaret Wolfson, who now runs naming at Namebase, still splits her time between naming and performing one-woman shows around the world in which she recites classical myths. The renowned pharma namer Arlene Teck (coiner of Viagra, from “vigorous” and “Niagara”) writes haiku. Maria Cypher of Catchword fronts a rock band. Other namers are stand-up comics, photographers, rappers, linguists and poets. “A good name has the potency of any piece of art,” says Martin McMurray, a partner at Zinzin. Wolfson’s friend Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, has told her that she is engaged in creating “practical poetry,” an assessment that Wolfson embraces, though she says she doesn’t use the term with all her clients.